Shafaq Haroon

I am an accomplished Agilist with a passion for driving the timely delivery of mission-critical software projects through effective team coordination, stakeholder engagement, and outstanding leadership. My key strengths include being able to operate in a world of fast-moving cutting-edge technologies, building high performing teams in the distributed environment, creating and communicating the product vision, managing project delivery, stakeholder management, and risk management who thrive in leading teams to deliver high-quality software solutions. My career has been marked with acknowledged Agile transformations, effective backlog management, and productive team facilitation in the sectors of Fintech, Telecoms, HR, Robotic automation, Ecommerce sectors.
I support teams repairing broken agile by shifting the mindset from ‘doing agile’ to ‘being agile’.

Scrum Master/Agile Delivery Lead – Robotic Processing Automation management platform.
CTwo Automate, London (Jan 2023- Jan 2024)

Worked with 2 Scrum and 1 Kanban team of front-end and back-end engineers on a Robotic Processing Automation tool that manages robotic workforce from one platform-boost capacity, automatically handles 90% of errors, improve visibility.
Key Achievements:
 Worked with teams to identify and prioritize customer needs, resulting in a 25% increase in customer satisfaction scores and a 20% improvement in product-market fit.
 Assisted teams in creating and managing a product backlog, leading to a 20% increase in backlog transparency and a 15% improvement in backlog prioritization.
 Helped teams develop and track metrics to measure progress, resulting in a 25% increase in team accountability and a 30% improvement in project predictability.
Team Level Responsibilities:
 Coaching the teams on scrum values and ensuring the team lives agile values and principles and follows the processes and practices agreed in the Working Team Agreement, DOR and DOD.
 Facilitated the transition of the engineering teams to good agile practices by developing full understanding of the Scrum framework and why it benefits all parties.
 Act as a servant leader and facilitator, supporting teams in their day-to-day operation of best agile practices.
 Establish, organize, and moderate Scrum Rituals, most notably: Daily Stand-Up, Sprint Planning, Sprint Review and Retrospective
 Ensuring and supporting the team to use appropriate estimation techniques to size user stories.
 Continuously work on team building and maintaining a high level of motivation and an overall productive atmosphere within the Squads. This includes managing conflicts within the Squads and between the Squads and Squad-external Stakeholders.
Involvement in Product delivery:
 Plan and manage the delivery of approved products using agile techniques and frameworks to ensure delivery of high-quality products and user experience.
 Manage and develop stakeholder relationships including steering committees, through effective communications, documentation, negotiation and issues management to ensure delivery of products and the achievement of outcomes and benefits.
 Manage stakeholder expectations by informing leaders on progress against milestones. Also, collaborated with stakeholders to understand business needs and strategic direction, building relevant solution mappings and concepts.
 Develop strategies for the continuous monitoring, evaluation and improvement of all aspects of product delivery including but not limited to, analysis of customer feedback, facilitation of agile ceremonies and
artefact production, identification and mitigation of risks.
 Worked closely with business and product development teams, ensuring epics and stories are correctly understood, prioritized, and delivered with a release plan that encompasses multiple market customer usage.
 Working in close collaboration with Product Owners and Business Administration to establish a healthy backlog aligned to the product roadmap.
 Assisted the Product owner to translate product strategy into actionable concepts and detailed requirements, scoping and prioritizing activities based on customer demand and business needs.
 Be a key contributor to identifying risks, understanding the impact, and liaising with the business and technology teams to put robust controls in place.
 Fostered open communication between executive stakeholders, engineering, and marketing, resulting in an improvement of the feature development life cycle by 20% within a year.
Metrics Tracking and Monitoring:
 Setting up, configuring, and monitoring the JIRA board
 Closely tracking iteration progress and made Teams' progress visible (Velocity, Burndown charts & other metrics, and Information Radiators) on an ongoing basis to provide a qualitative measurement of the teams' progress and the performance of a developing product.
 Measure the end-to-end flow of work through a product value stream and working closely with the team to achieve the agreed Service Level Expectations of the stakeholders.
 Responsible for maximizing the ongoing performance of the team, ensuring predictability, visibility, collaboration, and high quality. Working in close collaboration with Product Owners and Business Administration to establish a healthy backlog aligned to the product roadmap.
 Measure success in terms of adoption, engagement and other key OKRs of the solution.
SAFe Scrum Master/ Team Coach – Systems Engineering/ DevOps
MMT Digital (outsourced to Vodafone UK), London (May 2021 – Jan 2023)
Worked with 2 Kanban and 1 Scrum team of DevOps engineers across a range of technologies including JAVA, C# and Python and remained involved in the evolution of DevOps, CI/CD toolchains, new software lifecycles and agile methodologies.
Key Achievements:
 Assisted teams in developing and refining their Agile processes, resulting in a 20% increase in team efficiency and a 15% decrease in project delays.
 Helped teams identify and remove impediments to progress, leading to a 10% increase in on-time project delivery and a 15% reduction in rework.
 Guided teams in developing and maintaining a continuous integration and delivery pipeline, resulting in a 20% reduction in deployment time and a 25% improvement in release quality.
Team Level Responsibilities:
 Helps the team embrace SAFe Core Values, adopt, and apply SAFe Principles, and implement SAFe practices.
 Mentor team members on Agile methodologies and Azure Devops tools
 Assertively ensured agile/scrum concepts and principles are adhered to when rules are about to be broken or anti patterns are discovered.
 Working collaboratively with the team to resolve and prevent any defects, risks, or issues, whilst keeping key stakeholders updated with progression.
 Day-by-day help remove impediments that can jeopardize sprint goal, pose a threat to teams’ health whilst fostering an environment for high-performing team dynamics, continuous flow, and relentless improvement.
 Helps the team manage interpersonal conflicts, challenges, and opportunities for growth encouraging an open not biased mind with focus on the solution than the person/problem.
 Protect the team from uncontrolled expansion of work or out of control scope.
 Facilitation of events, like the Daily Stand-up, Sprint Planning, Sprint Review, and Sprint Retrospective ensures optimal team performance and meeting of the timelines.
Involvement with Product Management Team:
 Worked with product owner to define roadmap, prioritize feedback, and plan releases.
 Communicating and articulating the benefits of any new features and how they can help deliver on company's strategic goals.
 Supporting in breaking down high-level milestones into requirements, user stories, and acceptance criteria
 Promote a culture of continuous improvement, adapting to evolving industry trends and user needs.
 Communicates progress with management and stakeholders whilst monitoring their interaction with the team to ensure they are helpful and not disruptive.
 Working efficiently with senior management and stakeholders to implement the necessary organizational changes required.
Involvement with Agile Release Train:
 Worked closely with the Release Train Engineer for the ART in coordinating dependencies between scrums teams.
 Work in collaboration of other scrum master to identify and remove larger organizational impediments that might hinder the progress of multiple Agile teams.
 helps ART align with Lean and Agile principles, ensuring that work is prioritized based on value, and that the flow of value is optimized.
 Engaged with fellow Scrum Masters to identify opportunities for improvement across delivery processes.
 Participate in Agile Release Train activities, like PI Planning, focusing on laying out a plan for an entire release, System Demos, and the Inspect and Adapt.
 Serve as a Liaison between the Development and the Operation teams and encourage them to implement better CI/CD practices. Also facilitate the removal of impediments in the flow of CI/CD practice implementation.
Metrics Tracking and Monitoring:
 Setting up, configuring, and monitoring the Azure DevOps board
 Closely tracking iteration progress and made Teams' progress visible (Velocity, Burndown charts & other metrics, and Information Radiators) on an ongoing basis to provide a qualitative measurement of the teams' progress and the performance of a developing product.
 Reviewing the team average velocity using different metrics to ensure that the team is not overcommitting work into the sprint.
 Measure success in terms of adoption, engagement and other key OKRs of the solution.
 Supporting the product owner with relevant metrics to help articulate progress shared with both internal and external stakeholders which enabled predictability.
Agile Trainer
The knowledge Academy, United Kingdom (Oct 2018 – May 2021)
Conducted over 50 training sessions of ‘Professional Scrum Master’, ‘Professional Scrum Developer’ and ‘Certified Kanban Foundation and Practitioner’ courses. These training courses equip professionals with the latest agile methodologies and Agile practices, enhancing their ability to manage complex projects effectively. My responsibilities included:
 Provide support in designing of training programs.
 Conduct training sessions.
 Maintaining and enhancing training documentation.
 Provide guidance and support to attendees after the training.
Scrum Master/ Agile Delivery Lead- Fintech
Acumen Technologies, Lahore (Oct 2016 – May 2018)
Worked with 2 scrum teams of software engineers on a Fintech Mobile Banking application to create a mobile banking app, define your feature set, design a user-friendly interface, select a technology stack, develop and test the app thoroughly, and deploy it while ensuring ongoing maintenance and updates.
 Provide visibility of deliverables to stakeholders and the wider team
 Create an environment to address cross-team dependencies as effectively as possible.
 Highlight delays and blockers to stakeholders as required to assist the delivery function.
 Plan and facilitate collaborative sessions to help set realistic expectations for cross-team projects.
 Communicate status of cross-team projects to senior leadership
 Guide teams to reflect and identify improvements and successfully embed new approaches that move them towards high performance.
 Identify frequently occurring technical blockers, and work with teams and product managers to get them resolved.
 Form relationships with other delivery managers and project managers across the company; use these relationships to get and stay informed about relevant activities.
 Contribute to forming the company’s agile processes: metrics, measurements, release processes, dependencies.
 Assist in resolving issues in production; own the follow-up and ultimate resolution.
 Support product managers in visualizing the roadmap, measuring and being able to articulate product value as well as prioritization of the backlog.
 Bring together different disciplines from UX, Product and Engineering to support alignment across the organization.
 Identify where a coaching or mentoring approach is required and apply these techniques to guide teams and individuals to adopting an agile mindset.
Scrum Master- Accounting and Finance Application
Systems Limited, Lahore (Jan 2015 - Oct 2016)
 Acting as an ambassador for agile values throughout the organization, leading Scrum events and facilitating and coaching team delivery at pace.
 Driving the adoption of agile ways of working across the Digital Experience team and wider business, ensuring stakeholders at all levels are aware of what agile means for them.
 Shaping and delivering digital transformation to deliver an excellent customer experience.
 Bringing extensive knowledge of agile and embedding agile ways of working
 Influencing and collaborating at all levels.
 Building relationships, mentoring and coaching
 Bringing a positive, problem-solving approach to the team and wider organization
Additional Experience- Microsoft full stack developer.
Software Engineer, Lahore (Jan 2008 – Dec 2014)
 Developed web-based applications for Education, Ecommerce, Retail, Accounting and Financial sectors.
 Participated in system specification meetings, analyzed user requirements, coordinated with coders and team members.
 Followed Agile and Scrum Methodology Communication and collaboration, functioning software.
 Working with VS2010/VS2013 .NET Framework 4.0/4.5, Asp.net, c# .Net and MVC Web Application.
 Extensively working with User Interface using HTML5, DOM, COM, CSS, Bootstrap, Java Script, JQuery, Json Data and Angular JS
 Extensively Working with Whole data base moving to LINQ , Entity Frame work to SQL Server 2008/2014(Stored Procedures, triggers, tables, Views , etc)
 For User's information and associate ID's Supervisor ID's checking in DB reports (SSRS, SSIS using BI) for that Using SQL server 2008/2014 and SQL server Management studio
 Using Tortoise SVN/TFS for version control
 Extensively using browser for checking developing pages for debugging the application (Google Chrome, IE and Firebug of Firefox browser)
 Using Object oriented programming methodologies

Masters of Computer Science: Software Engineering
University Of Engineering And Technology– Lahore (2010 - 2013)

Certifications
Advanced Certified Scrum Product Owner®
Professional Scrum Master II
Certified SAFe 6 Scrum Master
Kanban Management Professional
Certified Agile Leadership- CAL-E & CAL-T
Professional Scrum ™ with KANBAN
Professional Scrum product Owner™
Certified Scrum Product Owner.
Certified Kanban Expert (Kanban- EXP™) Certification™
DEVOPS Operations Engineer™
Six Sigma Yellow Belt
Project Manager Accredited Certification™
Project Requirements Analyst Accredited Certification™
Certified Kanban Project Manager (Kanban-PM™) Certification™